Making Sense with Sam Harris - #219 — The Power of Compassion

Episode Date: October 8, 2020

Sam Harris speaks with James R. Doty about his memoir “Into the Magic Shop.” They discuss the significance of childhood stress, the possibility of changing one’s core beliefs about oneself, the relationship between surgeons and their patients, the nature of compassion, the Dalai Lama, the relationship between wealth and empathy, the worsening problem of social inequality, the physiology of compassion, the broken healthcare system in the U.S., and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.  

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher along with other subscriber-only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason

why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription there's an option at SamHarris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests. No questions asked. Okay, no housekeeping today. I will jump right into it. Today I'm speaking with James Doty.

James is a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University and the director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. He is also a philanthropist who has funded health clinics throughout the world, and has endowed scholarships and chairs at multiple universities, and he also serves on the board of a number of non-profits. And as you'll hear, he has a very unusual background. He grew up in real poverty and faced a number of challenges, and seemed by no means guaranteed

to succeed in life, but as you can hear, he has accomplished quite a lot. So we talk about how he did that and how we might better understand and facilitate the human capacity to overcome obstacles and bring more compassion into our lives and to generally make the world a better place. And now I bring you James Doty. I am here with James Doty. Jim, thanks for joining me. It's a pleasure to be with you. Thanks for having me. We're going to spend a lot of time talking about how you came to be the Jim Doty who's now speaking with me, but tell me how you summarize what you're up to now.

I'm a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford. Probably more germane for our conversation is I'm the founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism, which is part of the School of Medicine, and of which the Dalai Lama is actually the founding benefactor. And I'm also an inventor and entrepreneur and philanthropist at times. And I have really an interest, actually, in what drives people to be good, if you will. Okay, well, let's begin at the beginning. You've written a very poignant memoir, Into the Magic Shop, which covers your childhood, which really is not the usual childhood,

or I can only imagine it's not the usual childhood for someone who has the breadth of your life experience at this point. I mean, your memoir, it's almost like a fairy tale of challenges. I mean, just it entails an incredible amount of stress. In your earliest years, your father was an alcoholic, your mother was clinically depressed and often suicidally depressed. And then you had this transformation based on an encounter you had in a magic shop, literally a magic shop. So let's talk about how you began this journey of yours in life. How would you describe your childhood and what happened in the magic shop? Sure.

Well, of course, when a child grows up in poverty with a father who's an alcoholic, a mother who's had a stroke, partially paralyzed, clinically depressed, the big factor is that in some ways you're in a war zone all the time because you never know what's going to happen. You know, I wouldn't know whether my father was going to not come home or come home drunk or whether I would come in from school and my mother would be passed out from an overdose and I would have to call an ambulance. So So of course, when you grow up in that type of an environment, it's quite chaotic. And as you know, there's something called adverse childhood experiences. And this is essentially a technique where you sort of collect these events that a

child lives with growing up, poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, etc. And the higher the number, the less likely that child is going to, if you will, succeed by societal norms, and more likely that the child themselves will have drug and alcohol abuse and mental illness and a variety of other obvious negative events happen in their life. And at the age of 12, I was filled with hopelessness, despair, anger, and obviously it was affecting me. And in fact, I was becoming a juvenile delinquent. And I had had an interest in magic. And what would happen is when an event would happen at home that was not particularly pleasant, I would get on my Stingray bike and ride as far away as possible.

And on one of those adventures, I happened by a strip mall, and at the strip mall was a magic store, which I went into. magic store, which I went into. And the thing was that when I walked in, of course, my interest was in magic in the store. And there was a woman sitting there who had long flowing gray hair and her glasses on the tip of her nose and a chain around her glasses reading a paperback. And she looked up at me and she had this really extraordinarily radiant smile. And I asked her about the magic that I was interested in, and she said, well, I don't know anything about this. This is my son's store. I'm just here for the summer.

But this led us really to a conversation that ended up being quite deep, and one, frankly, which I wasn't used to. And the reason the conversation happened was because this is a person who made me feel psychologically safe. I wasn't fearful of her. I wasn't fearful that I was being judged. And she actually spoke to me as if I was an equal and that my opinion actually meant something, which for a child from my background was somewhat unusual. Yeah, so we'll talk about meditation and compassion and all of these interests that you and I have in common, and obviously your connection to training the mind was initiated in this dialogue with Ruth in the magic shop.

But what she was teaching you was not, in some ways, it was kind of a standard meditation practices, but in other ways, it wasn't. How would you summarize what she taught you there? Well, I think there were four parts. And I have to tell you, I mean, when she offered over the period of the six weeks to meet with me and, if you will, train me, which isn't really what she called it, but I actually, you know, had some concerns even about showing up. And I showed up not because I had self-awareness or insight. I showed up because she was giving me cookies, and frankly, I had absolutely nothing else to do. But I did show up, and the first thing she taught me, which is a technique that

now we would call a body survey and a breathing technique, and I did not appreciate that when you're stressed and you're anxious and your mind is all over the place, that with intention, doing this technique of relaxing the body and then slowly breathing in and releasing your breath really had a profound physiologic effect. This was in 1968, and of course terms like mindfulness or meditation or neuroplasticity were certainly not commonly used at all. And after a few weeks of doing this practice, I felt in some ways much calmer. And it was interesting because while the first few weeks, I didn't really notice anything, as I did it more, I did notice something. But one of the things I was having challenges with was, as I did this and sat with my own silence, I would have this negative dialogue going on in my head. And it was one that said, I wasn't good enough, I wasn't smart enough, etc., etc. And what she

explained to me was that that dialogue was not truth, and that negative commentary, if you will, sticks to us because they're the things that potentially put us at risk. And that, in fact, that negative commentary could be changed. And this is what she called training the mind or taming the mind. And basically, it's what we would now call self-compassion, this technique that has been advocated by Kristen Neff and others, to be kind to yourself. I realized that I was always beating myself up and blaming myself for my situation. And so with that technique, and she described it as listening to a radio station, if you will, that you could change it. I changed it from one of negativity to one of self-affirmation and self-acceptance, and that, in fact, I was worthy.

I tell people that when you make these types of negative comments to yourself, it's as if you're laying these bricks down that are creating a self-imposed prison and very much giving your power away or agency away to change things in your life. change things in your life. Because every time you say, I can't, it's not possible, the reality is that. And I did not even understand that at the time. And so by changing that dialogue was extraordinarily helpful to me for a couple reasons. One is many of us have a shadow self that we don't want to admit to, and things that we don't like about ourselves, things that disgust us about ourselves, our failings. And for many people, they have a tendency to try to push it away from them or hide it somewhere,

and it doesn't go away. And in fact, when you're troubled or have difficulties, And it doesn't go away. And in fact, when you're troubled or have difficulties, that's when it shows itself. And this is where you can relate it to addiction. When you're particularly stressed, that addiction comes out. And so she taught me to accept that as a part of me and don't deny it and just be aware of it. And the other thing is that because I was so critical of myself, it made me hypercritical of everything and everyone around me. And what I found is that because of that, when I interacted with others or tried to accomplish something, I would take a negative view of it. And what I didn't appreciate is that human beings have this unique ability to intuit emotional states from facial expressions,

voice intonation, body habitus, even smells. And when you carry yourself in that fashion, people don't want to be around you, they shy away or they're not open and they're not generous. And as a result, what I tell people is that when I changed how I looked at myself, it changed how the world interacted with me. The other side effect of that was that I carried a lot of anger and hostility towards my personal situation, my parents, and of course that was not fruitful in any way. And what happened was that I was able to see them in a much different way. I saw them as human beings who had their own pain and suffering, and the tools that they had to deal with them were not effective at all. You know, hiding your pain behind alcohol or, you know, taking pills to get rid of the pain and hoping that it would keep it away isn't helpful.

And I, in some ways, forgave them and accepted the situation, not trying to hope the situation would be different. And that change in perspective, which I think is important in a lot of these practices, is really very, very important. Well, she taught you something else in the magic shop, which on the surface can sound pretty spooky. I mean, it's in line with what you just described generically in terms of changing your concept of yourself. I mean, she asked you to list what you want in life and to visualize yourself having it, I mean, to really inhabit the person

who already has these things, whether it's great wealth or great success, or you had a list of things which was fairly adorable for a 12-year-old, I mean, including, you know, having a Porsche and a Rolex, but she wanted you to not see it from the outside, but really see it from the inside and to practice this visualization that really this is a fait

accompli, you're guaranteed to arrive at the desired station in life. And what you need to do now is inhabit the psychology of that and make it real for yourself. And as you walk a line in your description of this that is, to my eye, on the right side of rational here, because there's a rational way to understand how this can benefit a person, but it could also just tip into sounding like The Secret. I don't know if you remember that book and that movie, the movie by the name that is the appropriate target of opprobrium at the center of new age irrationality. But the idea that if you just visualize things or think it's true or assert that it's true, it will become true, whether it's attaining wealth or losing weight or anything else. But describe to me how you think about the power of visualizing certain outcomes and how that enforces change in one's basic neurology or one's associated behavior and the kinds of

opportunities that present themselves in life. Sure. No, I think you're right. I will be frank with you. I'm not a fan of the secret or the Celestine prophecies, etc. I don't believe that there's a magic external power, and we just need to tap into it and everything will be wonderful. What I do believe, and in some ways I said earlier, is that each of us has extraordinary power, we just don't

realize it. And negative self-dialogue limits that power. What she taught me and what I realize is that when you utilize your senses, and I think we see this now in sports psychology. People think about the athletic event they're going to do over and over and over again. And the reality is, as an example, it's been shown in a variety of studies that when you think about, as an example, lifting weights, you actually increase, to a small degree, your muscle mass just by thinking about it. And when you repeat something in your head over and over and over again, it starts setting down neural pathways. And when you utilize all your senses to do that, you write it down, you read it, you verbalize it, you think about it, etc., etc., then I would say that if there is a possibility of it

happening, that is the best technique to help that manifest. And I'll give you an interesting example. As a neurosurgeon, of course, I see a lot of patients who have a variety of conditions, but most of the patients who see me will say something like, wow, doctor, I've never heard of that. And then I see them a few months later and they go, you know, it's the most amazing thing. Since we talked about it, I found that I have that. I've run into five people who in fact do have that. And the reason is, is because you have put a subconscious primer out there, and they're now attuned to that. And in many ways, this is like the technique that Ruth taught me. I put into my subconscious this idea, this possibility, this potential opportunity, and then I am attuned to events that will allow that to occur. I don't know if you've seen the book by a guy named Bob Neese.

It's called The Power of 50 Bits. No. Well, the premise is as follows, is that we have about 6 to 10 million sensory inputs happening every second, but we're really only able to process about 50 or 100. And so when you put these things into your subconscious, in some ways you're creating a folder with that thing in it that sits out there, and that's one of the things that you're going to pay attention to, but it's not necessarily on a conscious level. And I think that is how you're able to have these things manifest. But it's not, you know, praying to a power and hoping it happens. There's actually a process here. And you know, if you look

at the placebo effect, if you look at how different individuals are able to make things happen, as an example, of course, we know monks who can control their heart rate or their body temperature. All of these things are available to us. It's how do you get access to it and what's the best way to get access to it to have it manifest. Yeah, well, there's a fact here which explains a lot of this, and it's that the brain, on some level, doesn't know the difference between what's real and what is merely a simulation. I mean, the brain is a kind of simulation machine, and the dreaming brain and the waking brain share a fair amount of real estate apart from their frontal reality testing mode that kind of goes offline when you're dreaming.

So to visualize something vividly is not nothing for the brain, right? You are training something, and there are many levels of this phenomenon we can witness, some deliberate and some not. I mean, the change you noticed in your patients, everyone has noticed in their lives when they decide they're looking for a new car or they're looking for a new anything, that class of objects in the world suddenly becomes super salient to them, and they're noticing that brand of car or that type of dog or anything else that they have suddenly become interested in. They're noticing that thing everywhere and it looks like there's been a change in the frequency

out in the world, but no, it's just you're just filtering based on that class of information. It should be very easy to see how negative self-concepts become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think you're the kind of person who isn't good at parties, can't socialize effectively with people, a person who no one likes, well, if that's your self-talk, you can imagine just what you're ramifying in relationship with people out in the world and the way that becomes self-perpetuating. And the opposite, obviously, can become the case. And what you're describing as a practice of kind of seizing the reins deliberately and jump-starting a virtuous cycle of self-fulfillment and just changing your self-concept. No, I think that's exactly right. And what's so unfortunate is that

this is free and available to everyone. And what's unfortunate is, as you point out, people get into these cycles of these negative emotional states and ruminate on them. And again, unfortunately, it just reinforces that. Again, I was fortunate in that with Ruth's intervention, if you will, that changed everything. And it made me see the issue wasn't me. The issue was my negative self-talk. And once I got over that and truly believed, if you will, of infinite possibilities, then that allowed a whole series of events to happen. Well, so then you went on to go to college, as improbable as that seemed, given your background. And it really did seem improbable.

Even with all your visualization, you sort of barely got an application in hand. even with all your visualization, you sort of barely got an application in hand. And then you not only went to college, you went on to become a neurosurgeon. Let's talk for a few minutes about the choice to become a neurosurgeon. I actually have, as you know, a PhD in neuroscience, but I don't know too many neurosurgeons well. I mean, I know a few, I don't know too many neurosurgeons well. I mean, I know a few, but in terms of actual friends who are neurosurgeons. So what I know about the culture of neurosurgery is from the outside. I remember reading this book a while back, When the Air Hits Your Brain. I don't know if you've ever read this book by Vertisek.

I don't know how faithfully he captures the culture, but he really does paint the culture of neurosurgeons as a culture of gunslingers and frat boys. It seems to be a specialty that selects for a kind of high testosterone arrogance. And you and your, certainly in your residency, as your visualizations were actually working, there was a fair amount of arrogance that came online for you. Tell me what it was like to become a neurosurgeon and how you view that field of expertise. Well, I would say that over the last number of years, that has changed somewhat. But you're right. I mean, this is a group of people who are comfortable with somebody's life in their hands, realizing that a false move can destroy someone's life. And with that power in some ways, for many people comes a sense of arrogance and a belief of infallibility. And so, of course,

the system selects for those types of people. The other interesting thing about it is, of course, not only do you have to be intelligent, hopefully you have good judgment and technical abilities. good judgment and technical abilities. That's not always the case. But the thing for many of these people is most decided they were going to be a neurosurgeon, I mean, literally in high school or early in college, and it was this driving force that made them want to be a neurosurgeon. My situation was quite a bit different in that I was actually interested in plastic surgery, specifically in caring for children who had craniofacial deformities, and I thought being a neurosurgeon would be helpful for that. I realized I wasn't that interested in general surgery, which is usually the path to then do a fellowship in plastic surgery.

So I was, if you will, very late to the game, and it was never a burning desire of mine to be a neurosurgeon for the typical reasons. So my view was somewhat different. But I would also suggest it's an extraordinarily demanding specialty, and I tell people, if there is absolutely nothing else you can imagine yourself doing, that's great, become a neurosurgeon. Otherwise, if there's anything that interests you beyond that, you should do that, because this is a lot of hours and hours of training. I mean, neurosurgery is now seven years. Certainly, if you're going into academics or many people, just regardless, do a fellowship of one to two to three years. So you're now 10 years down the

road from college, and it's a specialty that requires intense focus, an immense amount of diligence, and frankly, heartache. Nothing is more painful than to have to tell someone that their loved one either is devastated, didn't survive, you weren't able to do what you were going to do. survive, you weren't able to do what you were going to do. Now, interestingly, I know colleagues who, for them, those types of statements are just another day at work, and it's like water on a duck's back. For me, I take it much more personally. Yeah, I can hear. So yeah, I wanted to ask you about that because obviously we're now getting to the topic of compassion. And I was wondering how much your experience as a surgeon, which really, again, from the outside, I mean, any kind of surgeon, but I think a neurosurgeon is maybe the ultimate example of this. and a pediatric neurosurgeon, one of your,

the beginning of your memoir puts us in the OR, where you're operating on a brain tumor in a child. I just can imagine having those conversations with parents, you know, who are understandably in extremis. I mean, this is the height of fear, of uncertainty before surgery, and obviously in those cases where it goes well, that has to be a joy second to none. But when it doesn't go well, that has to be truly harrowing.

You just raised the topic that I was wondering about. If compassion, and again, we need to talk about compassion and define it and differentiate it from other states of mind, but before we get there, I'm just wondering if compassion is the only tool you need to navigate moments like that, or if there's something less ideal. I can imagine there's almost a kind of benevolent or fortuitous psychopathy that comes online for many surgeons where it's just like, this is just the job, right? You can't take this to heart every time or even generally because this will destroy you if you're moved around too much by the outcomes here. And it sounds like some surgeons do this

to a fault. They're kind of checked out emotionally around the reality of the situation for the parents or for the patients. How do you view the range of emotions that are ideal in this circumstance, and how do you navigate that? Well, it's interesting because it is a broad range. There's a subset of people who, frankly, may be on the Asperger spectrum, who, they're great technicians, they know the literature, et cetera, et cetera. They have no emotional connection, and it is a job, and they do the job, they have no emotional connection, and it is a job, and they do the job, and then they're gone. And of course, if you're talking about a doctor-patient relationship, there isn't one. And I've even had people say, well, I know he's not very nice, and he's abrupt and brusque and arrogant, but he's a good surgeon. Okay. And then you have, you know, the other extreme where someone's highly engaging, very sensitive and connected and suffers with you. But the best I can, then there's no more of a discussion.

That's all you can do, and you're okay. And I think in my mind, of course, that would be the ideal situation. As in my book, I talked about a woman who was an opera singer who had an aneurysm, which is a dilatation of a blood vessel in the brain near her speech area, and asked me to operate on her. And by this time, she had seen a few other people. We had become friends. And when I had the aneurysm exposed, and really, literally, it truly was about to rupture, you could see the blood swirling in the aneurysm

because it was paper thin. And during that moment, I started thinking about her versus the technical aspects of doing that job. And my hands started shaking to the point where I had to stop and actually go into a meditation to essentially become a technician and displace my emotional connection to her out of the picture. And once I was able to do that, I was then able to effectively treat her and she did fine. And that's really one of the few instances where connecting with their humanity does not allow you to do your job. And that is a job of being a technician. Well, let's talk about, I think I do want to touch on your, kind of the

other side of your career where you've been an entrepreneur and someone who has run a company and had interesting adventures in wealth and philanthropy. We'll jump to that after we talk about compassion and how you came to focus on it and just what it is. How did compassion first become a primary focus of yours, and what is it? How do you think about it as a mental state and capacity? Well, on some level, it was always there. I just didn't quite understand what it meant. But what had happened was, at one point, I had had left Stanford and I had been intermittently involved with Stanford since I think 97.

But I had left to run an entrepreneurial company. Then the dot-com crisis came and I used to consult for setting up, if you will, neuroscience centers of excellence and went to a hospital in Mississippi and ultimately agreed to actually go there to build this program for them. But during that time, I had an experience with a child who was not cared for adequately and as a result had an infection in his brain and an abscess, and his parents waited too long to bring him in, and he, even with my best efforts, he died. But it put me into a period of reflection about all of these things, and when I went back to Stanford, I decided to explore this a little more and try to understand it. And

interestingly, when I initially talked to my colleagues at Stanford in psychology and neuroscience, actually, I was told that the academic exploration of compassion was a dead end, and that if anyone made that the center of their academic endeavors, they were not going to go very far. The fortunate thing was that I had some financial resources, which allowed me to fund what we initially called Project Compassion, which brought a group of psychologists and neuroscientists together. And we started a journal club looking at the literature and then did some studies. And really, it was evident that actually these practices or, if you will, the nature of compassion was quite profound in regard to how it affects your emotional state, how it can affect your physiology, and a whole variety of both brain and peripheral physiology measures. And this led to the creation ultimately of a compassion cultivation training program, which we did some studies on, and also I think led to some interesting studies. And then, of course, over time, and I think if you look over the last 12 to 15 years started this, you would talk about compassion, and for many people it was completely poo-pooed, especially by the corporate community, because it's looked as a form of weakness.

You know, people run over you if you're too nice, if you're compassionate. And I think now people recognize that it is, in fact, extraordinarily powerful. Yeah, so let's talk about what the mental state is, because it's often conflated with empathy and sympathy and pity, and it needs to be differentiated even from something that's integral to it, something like loving-kindness. It also gets operationalized differently in different studies, so that the neuroscience, as far as I can tell, is still a little fuzzy, because some studies, they're done in irreconcilable ways. I mean, some ask people just to generate the state of loving-kindness, essentially, without any stimuli, and then some present subjects with images of human suffering to which they respond. And so I think that, at least in my view, the generic definition of

compassion is loving-kindness in the presence of suffering, where human suffering or animal suffering is taken as its object, and it includes this desire, this motivation to alleviate the suffering of others. It has a few things bundled in here. It's directly cognizant of suffering, so it has a kind of cognitive empathy, but it doesn't have the same kind of emotional contagion. It's not like you're sad when the object of your compassion is sad, or you're depressed when the object of your compassion is depressed. It's a highly pro-social and even positive emotion. I mean, it's not morbid. It's not a state of collapse. You're not feeling diminished psychologically by proximity to the suffering of others. In fact,

it's an expansive state that has the feeling tone of loving kindness, but it has this extra topspin of wanting to respond to the suffering of others by alleviating that suffering. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think you're exactly right. I think, you know, if you were to make a graph and you put agency and effort on one and you put understanding and engagement on the other, agency and effort on one and you put understanding and engagement on the other, sort of in the downward left corner would be pity. And this is, I'm sorry for you, or, and it's invariably related to, I'm superior to you. I appreciate your situation. It has nothing to do with empathy or anything else. It simply has to do with you recognizing it, and you feel bad for them, but it doesn't imply you're going to do anything for them. While sympathy is less than empathy,

it's on a cognitive level, if you will, understand that you're in pain and I feel for you, understand that you're in pain and I feel for you, but it requires no agency per se, while empathy is actually taking on the emotional state of another, but it has no valence. You can have empathic joy, and that can feel very good. Or as Mathieu Ricard will describe, who's a Buddhist monk who I'm sure you probably know, he says, when I take on pain and feel for the other's pain, it is so painful to myself that I can barely stand it. Compassion is different in the sense that it is associated with suffering. It requires your take on that emotional state, but you have a very strong motivational desire to alleviate that suffering. And I think that's really the key there, is that you are motivated to alleviate

that suffering. Now, interestingly, Jamil Zaki, who wrote a book on kindness recently, says empathy is the same as compassion, or he uses them interchangeably. He and I have had some discussions about that, but I think some people do have a tendency to use that, but I would not use it that way. Yeah, the terminology here is uncertain enough that even my friend Paul Bloom could write a book against empathy, differentiating two different types of empathy, one of which I agree with him is not a good guide for moral deliberation, which is, again, just more this pure emotional contagion side of it, which is just being taken in by suffering and feeling it as your own, but in a way that is causing you to actually not be able to respond effectively or even think rationally about what would help. Their problem has become your problem,

and you're yet another drowning person who doesn't know how to swim and needs to be rescued. Yes. So then how did you get connected with the Dalai Lama and other Buddhists in this vein? Yeah. So, and this may sound like magical thinking, and I hate to do that to you. I was involved in this work with these scientists, and we had begun some initial research studies, and we were thinking about having a conference. And I was walking through the Stanford campus one day, and again,

literally, an image of the Dalai Lama came into my head. And frankly, I had zero interest in the Dalai Lama, per se. And more interestingly, my wife was a huge fan. And in fact, she had bought tickets for us to go to an event, and I actually refused to go because it didn't interest me. But for some reason, this image stayed in my head, and I decided that it would be good to invite the Dalai Lama to this conference that we were thinking about doing. And he had been at Stanford once previously discussing addiction and craving. And I tracked down the person in Buddhist studies who had invited him and then connected him to one of His Holiness's translators, who had a PhD from Cambridge, and was a former monk.

Is that Tipton Jinpa? Exactly, yes. And Jinpa then arranged for this meeting. And so at this meeting, and it's always interesting how things go, because it was just me with this idea. But when I was meeting with the Dalai Lama, we had the dean of the medical school, the associate dean, you know, it became an entourage. We met with him, and His Holiness, as you know, was very interested in neuroscience and was very, very interested in this topic and was immediately engaged. And our 15-minute conversation that was scheduled ended up being an hour and a half. And at the end of it, he began a very animated conversation with Uptin Jhenpa.

And I thought, actually actually I'd somehow irritated or made the Dalai Lama angry, which of course is a very embarrassing thing to do. That would be a feat. I would take that as a feather in your cap. Yes. Although I have seen him angry. But at the end of this animated dialogue, Jinpa turned to me and he said, his holiness is so moved by this effort that he wants to make a contribution. And at that moment, he made the largest donation to a non-Tibetan cause he had ever made, which shocked everyone there. And I was quite overwhelmed and moved myself. And then shortly thereafter, two other individuals made significant donations, and that actually created the center. Nice, nice. And how much time have you spent around him since? Have you met him on multiple occasions?

Yes, actually. Many occasions in different parts of the world, I've spent time with him and have chatted with him. Ultimately, I also became chairman of the Dalai Lama Foundation for several years understand why people want to be near him. And in some ways, it's like what Ruth offered me, which is unconditional acceptance and love without qualification. And very few people actually give that out in an interaction with them. And when you're in his presence, what I tell people is that in modern society, which is different than how we lived a few hundred years ago, a few hundred years ago, we lived in a village. We typically had multi generations in the village. Everyone knew you from the time you were a child growing up. You didn't move away. You had an incredible support system. You had a community. And that community is extraordinarily important to your mental and physical health, I think.

And in modern society, we don't have that at all. You don't have your parents around. You don't have your siblings. You don't have loved ones in proximity. And so as a result, we have a tendency to create these shields that we carry around, which are the ones that say, I'm this, I'm that, I've accomplished this, etc., etc., etc. But there's no true authenticity that is ever released. And when you're with somebody like the Dalai Lama, you know immediately that you are unconditionally accepted and loved. And it's really quite profound because when that happens, it's almost as if this weight is lifted off of you and this natural joy and exuberance about being alive in some ways is released.

And so I think when you look at people who strive to be near these types of individuals, you can perfectly understand why. Yeah, it is still somewhat mysterious to explain, but it's a genuine phenomenon. I have spent a lot of time with great meditation masters, and I spent some considerable time, albeit briefly focused, over the course of a month with the Dalai Lama. I met him on a number of occasions, but I strangely got to be one of his bodyguards for a trip through France. So he was on a kind of a teaching tour of France. And for whatever reason, I got to be part of the Buddhist retinue that was the buffer between the real security guards. When he's in France, he gets, or at least at that point, he got, you know, their version of Secret Service protection, something he did not get in the United States. And so there

were like four guys with guns who were, you know, really protecting him. But then there was this buffer of essentially students of meditation and, you know, people who had sat three-year retreats in France with various lamas. And there were maybe 12 of us. And ironically, we had the most conflict with the general public because we were the buffer between the real bodyguards and the public. It was a surreal experience to walk into a room more or less continually focused on what could go wrong, who was untrustworthy, just basically radiating bad vibes of suspicion everywhere. And to have over your shoulder the Dalai Lama beaming unconditional acceptance and love and just

general ease. And it was, I must say, it was a bad job. Certainly not where one wanted to be in one's thinking alongside him, but it's where one had to be, because he really did have security concerns, and it's amazing the number of weird people who show up when his presence is announced somewhere. But it gave me a chance to spend some time with him and see what he was like again and again and again, mingling with strangers of all sorts.

And yeah, he's a very impressive person in that way. He does have a kind of laser focus on just connecting with people. You know, albeit very briefly, I mean, he'll walk into the lobby of a hotel and there'll be 40 people hoping to catch his attention. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, hotel and there'll be 40 people hoping to catch his attention. I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.